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CMOment: Embracing humility

What do you see as the biggest challenge facing marketing: fragmented media, empowered consumers, evolving technology, or all of the above?

I believe in all of the above. There’s a variety of things. What are the major challenges, candidly often represent the greatest opportunity.

Let’s start with technology. Clearly, trying to stay on top of everything that’s happening has become a job in itself. As I often say, I’ve learned to embrace humility on a daily basis at this point; there is more and more that I don’t know about, because everything is changing.

The other challenge is: you have to be careful not to go towards everything that is new and shiny, because it may not be exactly what’s appropriate for your brand at any point in time.

Fragmented media is interesting. Again, it’s a great challenge but it’s a great opportunity.

The holy grail is the right content, on the right platform, in the right format, at the right time. This whole fragmentation of media is challenging, but it provides the opportunity to be smarter about your media strategy.

And when you talk about empowered consumers, that just raises the bar for everyone. It raises the bar in terms of the focus on creating valuable content, valuable messaging—however that manifests itself—because there is so much choice.

There is the ability to turn on or off. From my perspective, that raises the bar for brands.

What are some challenges specific to your brand: regulation, consumer trust, image issues?

Hopefully we’re coming out of the larger reputational issues of the financial crisis. I think it’s an issue of relevance.

We’re not unlike other financial institutions. We’re not unlike other B-to-B companies in the sense that we need to make ourselves relevant. We need to make ourselves transparent and we need to put narratives out there to the general public—which is a key target audience for us—trying to build a bridge of relevance and value.

I’d love to say we can be entertaining. We’re not there yet, but I do think we can be engaging. I think the biggest challenge is how do we create content in a way that people will engage with us and come away feeling that have had a valuable exchange.

Your focus has shifted to content creation. What part does native advertising and sponsored content play?

Content is clearly critically important. It’s the energy that feeds all of our machines at this point.

What has been new to us is pursuing partnerships with media entities for native—whether it’s the New York Times, whether it’s the Huffington Post, whether it’s Vox, whether it’s Quartz. One of our key pillars of media strategy is what I would call these deep partnerships.

Why they’re important is twofold. Media companies have en enormous amount of information on the types of things their target audiences are interested in engaging with and how that content needs to be served up. So the audience insight piece is tremendously valuable.

Media entities also bring tremendous distribution that we as a brand don’t have. So if you think about the value of that distribution, you can have a collaborative discussion with these guys and try to find the sweet spot between what our brand can talk about, in a way that is meaningful and is valuable to the media entities’ target audience.

One of the things that’s been core to our media strategy is we go to where the consumers are consuming information. We try and get in pathways of what is their organic media consumption. That’s also been an incredibly important driver of our focus on these media partnerships.

You have also stepped up your presence on social media. Why?

It opens us up to new audiences. It allows us to get our content out there in a new and different way. More importantly, it gets us thinking about additional content that we would create that would be appropriate.

We did some recruiting ads on Snapchat. This is where a large percentage of the people that we’re targeting to come work at Goldman are consuming information.

We wanted to have a presence there. It gave us an opportunity to introduce Goldman in a fresh and different way.

Social is critically important for us for two reasons. First, it allows us to engage with audiences, especially from a recruiting front, because that’s where they’re consuming information. But it also allows us to be more human, more authentic and create content around moments that are really well-served highlighting on social.

Goldman Sachs has made a big investment in digital media and shifted spending. Why?

We’ve always been focused on digital media. There was never a shift. The first real effort towards broad-based engagement with the general public from a communications perspective was when we launched our ad campaign, which was 100 percent digital. It was a series of short documentaries that were anchored on our website and we did short cuts for banners and pre-roll, etc.

Digital has always been the focus of our advertising strategy for a number of reasons. The first is we’re a facilitator. At the end of the day, we are part of a broader narrative and we needed time to tell that story in a way that demonstrated the ripple effect of what we do in collaborations with our clients that helps facilitate job growth, urban revitalization, the funding of innovation. It’s not a here-we-are-Goldman-Sachs.

And not unlike other brands, digital allows us to measure things. For a firm that’s very quantitatively-driven it’s very helpful to really understand how well we’re doing.

If you think about how the world is evolving and the way we’re carrying around a media consumption device 24/7, it’s not just about Millennials, it’s about all of us.

What’s next for Goldman’s marketing?

From a platform perspective, we want to go where people are. From a content perspective, we want to create valuable exchanges. And we want to do that from a plan perspective in ways that demonstrate thought leadership and innovation.

I don’t know what that looks like in two years. What I can say with certainty is that things change at a pace that I have never seen before. What’s so exciting is at a quarterly strategic conversation, you’re never talking about the same thing. There’s always new things on the horizon at every check-in point.

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